Here at TraderStatus.com™ we will bring together in one place the information necessary to help you survive unnecessarily high short-term capital gain taxes, self-employment taxes, Affordable Care (Obamacare) taxes, and state and federal income taxes. To accomplish this often a separate trading entity is the answer, but just as often we avoid it as not being cost effective in a particular situation.

Many traders do not yet even realize that they are paying far too much to the Federal Government. Existing, proven and legal procedures, which in many cases can significantly reduce taxes each and every year, are available to anyone qualified to choose to use them and to timely elect to use them.

As we all eventually learn, those low capital gain tax rates of 20% or lower are not available for the daytrader’s lightning fast trading profits. Rather, an individual daytrader’s gains (or losses) are subject to the higher ordinary income tax rates!

Investors and securities traders may incur substantial costs with online fees, commissions, real-time data-feeds, computer equipment and so on. The Internal Revenue Service, on their own, do not treat most taxpayers very fairly when it comes to deducting these expenses. Leaving it up to the IRS publications and instructions, at best, a taxpayer must first qualify to itemize his deductions on Schedule A – making those deductions subject to a 2% of Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) reduction and for high-income taxpayers even some additional limitations.

Whether you call it trader tax status or day trading or you just want to find out more about being a day trader, please take the time to read and understand the information found on our web site as it can be very helpful to you when preparing your taxes and when planning your tax strategies. Every month we hear from taxpayers who found this web site too late or after they already paid someone for a download that contained nothing more than the basic generic one-size-fits-all information. Taxpayers who were ill-advised by normally very competent CPAs and other tax practitioners, but for whom the tricks and traps of Trader Status were unknown to them or misapplied by them.

There are many excellent income tax advisers out there. And a good CPA does not need to know everything. He or she only needs to know how to look up the specific tax issues. And even more importantly – knowing when there is an issue or potential issue and that needs some attention.

Unfortunately the hard facts are that, when it comes to traders in financial instruments or commodities, many tax advisors still have no clue when there is a Trader Status issue to look up, let alone having the practical hands-on experience necessary to be aware of the hidden tricks and traps out there!

Odds of being audited:

Individuals, Form 1040 –

1:9.5 if the taxpayer is earning over $1MM (updated for 2015)

1:25 are the odds for individuals earning greater than $200,000.

1:100 for people earning less than $200,000.

1.6MM tax returns are audited annually, out of 150MM Form 1040 returns being filed.

8 out of every 10 audits result in additional taxes being assessed.

Are you in the top 1%? An AGI over approximately $428,713 puts you there!
The top 1% reported 19% of the country’s AGI, and they paid 37.8% of all federal income tax.

Are you in the top 5%? An AGI over approximately $179,760 puts you there!
The top 5% reported 34.4% of the country’s AGI, and they paid 58.6% of all federal income tax.

Are you in the top 10%? An AGI over approximately $127,695 puts you there!
The top 10% reported 45.9% of the country’s AGI, and they paid 69.8% of all federal income tax.

Entities filing Forms 1120 or 1120S or 1065 –

FY2012

FY2013

FY2014

FY2015

Small 1120

1.12%

0.95%

0.95%

Large 1120

17.78%

15.84%

12.23%

11.15%

Form 1120S

0.48%

0.42%

0.36%

0.40%

Form 1065

0.47%

0.42%

0.43%

0.51%

“No-change” rate for audits of Form 1120S 35%
“No-change” rate for audits of Form 1065 49%
“No-change” rate for audits of large 1040 41%

Help is out there for those qualifying taxpayers whom are active enough to file with the IRS as a TraderStatus™Taxpayer. Under Trader Status an electing daytrader may deduct all of his ordinary and necessary expenses. Taxpayers filing with Trader Status do not itemize those expenses on Schedule A (but yes, they may itemize other expenses and may even take the “standard deduction” in addition to all of their “trader status” expense deductions). Since a trader does not “itemize” daytrading expenses these are not subject to the 2% limitation, the 3% limitation, or many of several other restrictions the IRS places on the average investor!

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